October 7 and the problem of hindsight

Time: October 6, 2023

Place: Gaza Strip, Palestine

Date: A day like any other in the besieged Strip.

Sixty-four percent of residents, those living below the poverty line, are looking for ways to meet their basic needs. Sixty percent of young people are unemployed and out on the streets. Eight in every ten people depend on aid from one of the donor organizations, without which they could die of hunger. Everyone waits for electricity, which is available for only 11 hours a day on average, to charge their phones, wash their clothes, and catch a breath of cool air from a fan or an air conditioner. Only five percent have access to clean water; the rest are forced to drink water that would be dangerous even for animals.

No one knows when the next war will come, when the crossings will open, when a sick person will be able to travel for treatment, or when a student will be able to leave to study.

An ordinary day, just another day of uncertainty and hopelessness.

The people of Gaza did not live through this for a day or a week, but for years and decades.

The wisdom of hindsight

There is something deeply tempting about judging October 7 three years on. We know now what no one knew that morning. We know what happened after the first hours, how the war spread from Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, the scale of the destruction it left behind, and how much the region changed after that morning.

From this vantage point it easy to say: This should never have happened. That may be true. But judging a historical decision in hindsight, after we know its consequences, is not enough to understand why that decision was made at the time.

October 7 cannot be reduced to a single day. Nor can it be understood solely through what happened in its first hours. There was a Gaza before October 7. There was a blockade, repeated wars, escalations, mediation efforts, deals that fell through, promises that were never fulfilled, a deadlocked Palestinian political reality, and an Israeli-Palestinian process that moved only from one war to the next.

In the months leading up to October 7, indirect contacts took place between Israel and Hamas through mediators, aimed at reaching arrangements on prisoners and detainees, easing the blockade, and improving conditions in Gaza. Yahya Sinwar himself was a party to those contacts.

According to accounts that have emerged in Israel in recent weeks, a Palestinian intermediary carried messages between Sinwar and the Israeli side. In September 2023, after the negotiations stalled, the intermediary conveyed a message from Sinwar to the Israelis, warning of an “earthquake” if the talks did not move forward.

The message then reached them through an Emirati channel as well, while Cairo, at the same time, was relaying warnings about the gravity of the situation in Gaza and the possibility of an explosion.

Sinwar, who weeks later would become the mastermind of the October 7 attack, was at the same time sending messages asking for progress on arrangements that would ease the pressure on Gaza.

This tells us that history, before it becomes history, is a set of open possibilities. In Sept. 2023, no one knew that three weeks later would come October 7. There was a negotiating track that could have ended in an agreement, and there was the possibility of escalation, There were messages, warnings and contacts, with each side interpreting them according to its own assessments, information and interests. Then the event happened.

Suddenly, history closed off all the other possibilities. That is where the problem of “the wisdom of hindsight” begins.

Was it the only option?

Today we know the outcome, so many of the circumstances leading up to it seem clearer than they did at the time.

We know that October 7 led to a massive war, and that Israel responded with a devastating war on Gaza. We know the scale of the killing, destruction and displacement, that the region entered a chain of confrontations that did not stop at Gaza’s borders, and that the Palestinian cause itself paid an enormous price.

All of this makes it easy to look at the morning of October 7 and say: It was a catastrophic mistake. 

But the historical question does not end at the outcome. If you want to understand an event, you have to return to the moment when the outcome was still unknown. You have to put yourself, if only for a moment, inside that room. What did the decision-makers know? What did they believe, and what did they fear? What alternatives did they have? What made them think the option they chose was worth all the risk?

Major events do not begin on the day they happen. War does not break out with the first shot; sometimes it begins years earlier, in a deadlocked process, a failed negotiation, a prolonged siege, a miscalculation, or a growing sense that nothing is changing.

Then comes the day when one side decides to upend the table. The result can be catastrophic even if the decision-maker believes, at that moment, that they have sufficient reasons to take the gamble.

Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of October 7. It is not simply that a single decision opened the gates of hell. It is that the decision was made in a world in which no one yet knew where it would lead. We know the outcome now, and that makes our responsibility in judging the past greater, not smaller. The task is not to show how wise we were after the catastrophe, but to understand what was possible before it happened.

What is required is to understand how everyone failed to prevent the moment when catastrophe became possible, and to ask: What could have been done before the explosion became the only option?

That question matters more than winning an argument about October 7. History does not need more judgments made with the benefit of hindsight. It needs us to understand what could have been done before the catastrophe, and how a different outcome might have been possible.